Thursday, April 05, 2018

This month is April, which means last month was March, and because it was March, a month dominated by March Madness™ wherein college basketball teams are slotted into a big bracket and made to square off until a champion emerges at month’s end, every content farm on the Internet was stricken with the need to create its own kind of bracket, usually pop culture related, and usually while stipulating that they, like, totally wouldn’t be doing a bracket, man, if culture did not, you know, demand it. These brackets ran the gamut from weirdly arcane (Best Fake Drive-By Truckers song titles, won by “The Summer of Gin & Fried Chicken”) to distressingly banal (Best Brands, won by Häagen-Dazs) to shockingly specific (Best Non-US Capitals Everyone Thinks Are Capitals, won, in a mild upset, by Birmingham, Alabama) to predictably ironic (Definitive Bracket of Pop Culture Brackets, over at Vox, which we are not linking to because c’mon).

Astute readers may notice that Cinema Romantico did not participate in all this bracket madness. This was not necessarily because our blog is above such content bandwagon jumping, not at all, but because, well, like the Villanova Wildcats of the New Big East dispatched teams with such ease throughout real March Madness™ that they essentially rendered the massive bracket as immaterial to their spectacular sharpshooting conquest, this blog’s pop culture bracket had such a foregone victor that pitting others against her was a waste of everyone’s time. Some might say, “Doesn’t that mean your pop culture tournament was rigged?” To which we say, “The universe rigged our pop culture tournament for us.” Even we are not above the universe’s decrees.

So, we congratulate the winner of our pop culture tournament that was never contested because it was over before it was, Nicole Kidman of “How to Talk to Girls at Parties.” They say the Queen’s Birthday is April 21st, but Cinema Romantico toasts its Queen today.